I am migrating over to Fedora after being a long-time Windows user and I was hoping some of you could contribute to my pre-migration research.

I have a list of programs that I have been using in Windows for a long time and I dont know their equivalents in Fedora, I will paste the list below and hopefully I can get a decent Fedora program for each Windows program. Thank you!

Photoshop-type program

FTP program

CD burning and ISO image burning program

Font-viewing program

Clean up temp files program

Anti-spyware

Anti-virus

Firewall

IRC

Web coding (I use HTML-Kit in Windows)

Font viewer

color sniffer (allows you to pick up color code of any color on the screen)

CamStudio type program

Microsoft Word/Office type programs

Disk imaging software (like Acronis or Ghost)

Media PLayer

DVD player (rented DVD's)

Programmable hotkeys program (i use winkey in windows)

Torrent downloader

Screen capture program (something with more options than whats built in, i use Snagit in

The only thing I would say is that depending upon your needs, some of them might not be sufficient. It depends upon what you do in Photoshop--according to my graphic designer friends, Gimp isn't there yet. There is an alternative called Pixel which I haven't used. It's not free, but it's about $650 cheaper than Photoshop, if not more.

Ok most of those are the standard that come with Fedora 8 right?
Now what if I wanted something better?
Some of those, like Transmission, are very basic.

Not all of those come installed by default, but most if not all of those can be installed from repositories quite easily (you do know that Fedora practically requires a decent broadband connection?).

If you want something better, there are plenty of choices in most areas of software (some are admittedly lacking). You're right - Transmission is a basic client (that's incidentally why some people really like it). But there are others:
Ktorrent
Azureus
Bittorrent (official client)
Rtorrent (ncurses/console based)
Deluge
There are apparently some good Firefox plugins that allow torrent integration.

There's also WINE, which can work for some situations. I've heard of people being quite happy with running utorrent through WINE.

Here are my thoughts on those apps (some overlap with Wayne, of course). I've skipped a few outside my ken or interest.:

Photoshop-type program: the GIMP, but it's not quite as good as Photoshop
FTP program: gftp, filezilla, or fireftp (firefox plugin)
CD burning and ISO image burning program: k3b
Font-viewing program:
Clean up temp files program: yup, Cron job. but you could also manually delete all the files under the /tmp directory.
Anti-spyware: Don't need it.
Anti-virus: don't need it, but there are a few that I know of (ClamAV, AVG). But from what I understand they're mostly mean for running scans of Windows network drives remotely. There's really no need for anti-virus on the Linux desktop right now.
Firewall: built-in, as Wayne mentions, but I also like Guarddog
Web coding (I use HTML-Kit in Windows): Bluefish is quite good - for languages other than HTML, too. Kate can also do in a pinch (good multi-purpose text editor with syntax highlighting)
color sniffer (allows you to pick up color code of any color on the screen): might be able to do this with GIMP
Microsoft Word/Office type programs: open office, though not a full replacement
Media PLayer: oh, wow. I'd actually say the multimedia player situation is far better on Linux platforms than on Windows (I've personally been searching high and low for a music player in Windows I really like but can't for the life of me find one). Let's split it up:
Audio: Amarok, Banshee, mp3blaster (ncurses based console player), XMMS, XMMS2, Audacious, Rhythmbox, Quod Libet, Songbird, Listen, Gtkpod, MusikCube (maybe - think that one might be BSD only)
Video: VLC (my favorite), Xine, mplayer, kaffeine, totem
DVD player (rented DVD's): VLC, some of the others above
Programmable hotkeys program (i use winkey in windows): depends on your Window Manager
Torrent downloader: see above.
Screen capture program (something with more options than whats built in, i use Snagit in WinXP): sometimes built into your GUI, but there are also some command line utilities available.
Partition magic type program: I advise a Gparted live cd; http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/
WinRAR type program (i think 7zip, right?): Wayne's got it - you just need a package from a third party repository
Skype - runs native on Linux
Lookup IP addresses - besides whois.net?
Adobe Reader: can run it just fine on Linux. I usually use xpdf, a lighter pdf reader, except for those tricky pdfs that only display right in Adobe reader (rare).
Yahoo chat (not just IM, but also chat): Pidgin, Kopete. Those are both multi-protocol chat programs. There are some other ones out there that act is clients to just one protocol, but I like having all of my screennames in one program.

Did I mention you can choose from lots of different GUI shells?

__________________
- Tom"What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self." - Stirner

What about if I just need something out of the blue? Right now, I need an audio converter, to change .flac files to .mp3 files. In Windows, I would search download.com for something. How do I find something for this in Fedora?

What about if I just need something out of the blue? Right now, I need an audio converter, to change .flac files to .mp3 files. In Windows, I would search download.com for something. How do I find something for this in Fedora?

In this case mencoder would do what you require.

The first place to look for software to do a particular task is always to run the Package manager and use the search tag, other than that google or the search functions on these forums.